Help settle an argument about the founding of America

December 12, 2021 9:11 AM

Some much loved Blue State relatives of mine insist our country’s character was shaped the way it is (Trump, Ron DeSantis, etc.) because Britain “sent over its worst” people here and that Red State voters are heavily influenced by their ancestors who were in penal colonies. I think that’s probably not good history or criminology but I’m not a historian. Can someone please explain in the kindest possible way whether this is accurate?
posted by johngoren to Education (34 answers total)

Well, unless they're referring to Maryland and Virginia as the typical red state, I can't see what they could possibly be talking about.
posted by sagc at 9:36 AM on December 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

That seems… Questionable. As far as I'm aware the Americas were never a penal colony in the Australian sense. It seems like an attempt to rationalize the state of the country away and ignore a lot of pretty big societal problems by saying, Oh, it's all the fault of X.

I'm not a historian, just distrustful of pat explanations.
posted by Alensin at 9:37 AM on December 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

Britain and many other countries sent all kinds of people who came to America as slaves, indentured servants, settlers, merchants and adventurers. There were a lot of aristocrats as well, who brought over entire towns and regions of people they tried to control in the 19th century. A great and interesting example of this is New Braunfels, Texas, which was essentially created to become an independent German state. Poland is also an important example. Remember, people had to afford to leave and many who left were landless aristocrats or formal minor royals. Certainly, many people who came arrived with only the clothes on their backs and lived very hard, short lives in early America but I don't think your relative's idea holds water.
posted by parmanparman at 9:42 AM on December 12, 2021 [2 favorites]

if by DeSantis, they are referring to Florida - then that was not "british" it was "spanish", as was a LOT of the US at that time (before becoming independent).
posted by alchemist at 9:46 AM on December 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

The American colonies were never a major penal destination, and penal transportation ended in the 1770s anyway. Perhaps they are thinking of the frontiersman myth? i.e. the Libertarian-ish idea of a lone pioneer making his way across the virgin continent, with wholesale erasure of both the role of Indigenous people in shaping that continent and also the ways that settlers actively banded together to get anything done, from barn-raising to educating their kids.

If they are talking about Trump and DeSantis specifically, those families are German-Scottish and Italian respectively, emigrating during the late 1800s/early 1900s.
posted by basalganglia at 9:48 AM on December 12, 2021 [5 favorites]

I am a historian, but not a historian of the United States. I can, however, assert that this is grade A nonsense, in part because of the kinds of historical facts laid out above and in part because it relies upon an unspoken notion of criminality as inheritable in a quasi-genetic way.
posted by pleasant_confusion at 9:49 AM on December 12, 2021 [66 favorites]

I've heard this before -- often in reference to Oglethorpe and Georgia, from Georgians -- but it's folk history at best.

It's kind of a cod version of David Hackett Fischer’s Albion's Seed, which Joe Klein recently revisited in the NYT. There's a lot of good stuff in that book about how culture persists and replicates, but it's spawned many overdetermined readings, especially about the "Scotch-Irish" of Appalachia. (Klein is okay at balancing this in his piece.)

Anyway, if your relatives really want a sense of why Florida is Florida, they'd be better off with Carl Hiassen.
posted by holgate at 9:54 AM on December 12, 2021 [14 favorites]

There are a bunch of problems with that theory. First of all, the history doesn't work. There were some convicts who were sent to what's now the United States in the 17th and 18th centuries, but they were outnumbered by non-convict indentured servants and vastly outnumbered by slaves. Second of all, I think it's a little weird to think that 17th and 18th-century convicts were inherently more evil than other people. There were a lot of really awful things that were legal: the slave trade was legal, for instance, as was traveling all over the world and conquering people so you could steal their land. And a lot of transported convicts were guilty basically of survival offenses. Do your blue state relatives really think that a desperate person convicted of stealing food was a more-evil person than the pillars of the community who mass-raped their slaves because forced reproduction was a way of getting more slaves without paying for them? And finally, it seems to assume that there's some kind of innate, hereditary evilness, and I find that idea kind of abhorrent. So yeah, yuck.

There are a bunch of political commentators who have argued that American political culture can be explained by settlement patterns and the inherited cultures of particular groups of early migrants, and that there's a particular rightwing populist style that is associated with Scots-Irish people who initially settled in parts of the South and Mid-Atlantic and then spread out westward from there. I think that's pretty dubious, too, but it's at least a little more nuanced than your relatives' goof-tastic take.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 9:56 AM on December 12, 2021 [13 favorites]

This is a pretty good example of an idea that's not even wrong. I link because it's an important concept, that is useful to know about when evaluating these kinds of claims.
posted by SaltySalticid at 10:15 AM on December 12, 2021 [4 favorites]

There is a meme that the US's sins can all be boiled down to the Puritans being religious zealots who were kicked out of Britain, maybe that's where they're getting this from? This is, to be clear, wildly oversimplified, but it's slightly more true, since there were Puritans and they were more or less kicked out of Britain.
posted by BungaDunga at 10:17 AM on December 12, 2021 [9 favorites]

I agree with Holgate that they're going for Albion's Seed, which makes fascinating reading and I'd recommend.
posted by wattle at 10:34 AM on December 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

For reference, here (Pdf) is the 2000 US Census report on reported ancestry of Americans. English is fourth, after German, Irish, and African American.
posted by epj at 10:41 AM on December 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

Yeah it sounds like they got the Puritan thing mixed up with the Australian thing in their minds. People love a story that explains Why Are They Doing That and they heard these two things & they kind of got glommed together for them.
posted by bleep at 10:41 AM on December 12, 2021 [2 favorites]

As others have noted, the US was not a penal colony. For more on the European people who were "sent" to the US, see White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg.
posted by esoterrica at 10:46 AM on December 12, 2021 [2 favorites]

It could be that they're getting it from Albion's Seed, but I wouldn't be surprised if they encountered Colin Woodward's kinda bastardized take on Albion's Seed, which posits that there are eleven American nations with distinct political cultures. I'm not sure that holds up very well considering everything that's happened since that book was published ten years ago.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 10:48 AM on December 12, 2021 [3 favorites]

I thought Woodward's book was a better version of Albion's Seed because it wasn't trying to be as tidy -- it doesn't confine itself to UK-origin settlement and it looks at settlement patterns that cross national boundaries.

Nthing the point made often above that we know culture and legal structures have a lot of "inertia", at many scales, but extending that to inherent character of the people in them is too big a claim. It wouldn't allow for change, or for people moving successfully between regions, as people do.

If we think it's culture and legal structures giving us trouble, we can pick some to work to change, too. Less a counsel of despair, more a job to do.
posted by clew at 11:01 AM on December 12, 2021 [2 favorites]

I am a historian, and I agree with pleasant_confusion that this is not a historical question. Even if the US had been founded as a penal colony (and even if you assumed that everyone so imprisoned had been so because they had done awful things, which we know is not true), or even if it was accurate that Britain “sent its worst” people here (which: huh?), it still wouldn’t follow that people in the US today would be bad, evil, or immoral because of it. That is straightforwardly eugenic nonsense. There are no inherent, immutable, or inheritable traits that are determinative of a person’s moral character, not at the individual level or across generations.
posted by CtrlAltDelete at 11:24 AM on December 12, 2021 [19 favorites]

Another historian here confirming that pleasant_confusion has it - if you want to give your Blue State relatives a better historical explanation for why the country is the way it is, perhaps gift them the new 1619 book that just came out.
posted by coffeecat at 12:04 PM on December 12, 2021 [7 favorites]

Their argument is literally eugenics, also
posted by Jon_Evil at 1:01 PM on December 12, 2021 [9 favorites]

What jon_evil said
posted by kensington314 at 1:55 PM on December 12, 2021 [2 favorites]

Your friends might be referring to the Culture of Honor. This isn't about criminals being sent to the southern US, but it is about historical patterns of immigration and culture. I won't try to summarize, but clearly there are differences in culture between regions in the US, and some people feel that these differences derive in part from the communities that settled in those different regions.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 2:05 PM on December 12, 2021 [2 favorites]

Well, unless they're referring to Maryland and Virginia as the typical red state, I can't see what they could possibly be talking about.

Just FYI, Maryland is a blue state and Virginia leans blue.
posted by Flock of Cynthiabirds at 2:50 PM on December 12, 2021

Mississippi, Louisiana, and Georgia are all more than 30% black. In general, the southeastern states are among the most diverse states in the country. These accusations would make a lot more sense against some of the extremely white states in New England.
posted by hydropsyche at 2:56 PM on December 12, 2021

Sounds like this idea depends on the ideas that 1.) the US was founded as a penal colony--it wasn't--and 2.) the idea that the children of criminals will be inferior to other people in some way. You can get thrown in jail now for being poor, or for being black; does that mean the children of poor people, or black people, will be inferior in some way because their ancestors were criminals? The whole idea is not merely wrong, but also gross.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 4:35 PM on December 12, 2021 [4 favorites]

The only aspect I can get behind is the feeling that there's an ingrained siege mentality handed down from Scots-Irish plantation settlers. I remember visiting Belfast in the late 1980s and seeing “Belfast Says No” on a banner across city hall, which spoke to me of nepotism in city politics, a certain tribal entitlement, and a loud and unexamined victimhood in that sector of the Protestant population….things that seem weirdly similar to today's discourse in the US.
posted by brachiopod at 6:50 PM on December 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

One of the things I have been puzzling over throughout the pandemic times is why a certain contingent of the county where I happen to live (Jackson County, Missouri) was so quick to rise up in literal mobs and drive Mormons out of the state in the 1830s, then a couple decades later engaged in a decade of running firefights with abolitionists in neighboring Kansas (again the mobs - they seemed able to raise an armed rabble of 1500 or more on very short notice), then spent the Civil War in internecine warfare - Quantrill's Raiders, Bloody Bill Anderson and all the rest of the so-called "Bushwhackers" - then after the war devolved into armed outlawry with the outlaws usually viewed as folk heroes, let's not even get into the KKK history from that period (but doesn't the concept seem all too familiar? "Let's put together a random armed mob to roam the countryside and intimidate and 'defend' against the 'enemy'"), and so on down to the present day.

When yes, many of the literal and/or spiritual descendants of all those mentioned above are indeed the hard-core Trumpers, racists, and all the rest we are so familiar with.

So you could say these people were pretty clearly descendants of the "Scots-Irish Borderlanders" of Albion's Seed, mentioned above.

That might be a part of it, but something else very important was going on - and it was homegrown right here in America, not imported from anywhere.

If you look at the Missourians who were involved in all of the things I outlined above, most of them had moved to Missouri from places like Indiana and Kentucky. And often their families and moved there from the Appalachians. And often their families had moved there from more coastal Virginia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, etc.

So you've got people who have lived on the American frontier for generations - since the late 1600s or earlier in some cases - and have built their entire culture and way of life around that.

So yeah, people of the American frontier - except strip out all the mythological bullshit. Prototypical here would be, for example, the Boone family (except again, strip out the myth and the bullshit). By the time you have run these people through several generations of American frontier settlements and life you have:

- Isolated, insular, extremely individualistic, consider yourself and your family completely self-sufficient. Your success isn't thanks to government or communal accomplishment or education or anything else but your own strong arm and cunning, building what you need, making a profit from your business acumen and/or exploiting whatever natural resources might come your way, and defending what is your own as the need arises.

- Government and society is entirely homegrown. No outside government to speak of. Federal government presence is weak to non-existent. Whatever defense, law enforcement, etc, you want or need is strictly home-grown and ad hoc. You defend your own property or raise up a little posse of your neighbors, and just get it done as you think fit.

- Entitled. There is endless land to your west and it all belongs to you if you want it. Need slaves to help work your land? Well, no one is going to stop you and they sure are handy. You deserve the help.

- Continual conflict with Native Americans - and as with any other kind of defense, you defend yourself and your family or round up a group of neighbors to do the same. There is no question you have the right to do this.

- Religion is important but also entirely homegrown. No Rome or Canterbury or even Philadelphia is telling you what to do or what to believe. There is a reason groups like the Baptists became overwhelmingly popular. Your Uncle Thomas is minister, or your friend Lewis from across the valley. For the ministry or leading a church, no special training required other than a calling of the spirit. And it's nothing but you, your minister (maybe), and your bible that tell you what is right and what to believe. If you don't like what your minister is saying, there's another church with another variety of Baptist or Methodism or whatever suits your taste, just over the hill. Or, fire your minister and get one you like better.

Ever wondered why American Christianity - particularly the more homegrown, "southern," evangelical varieties - are a bit off from Christianity as experienced elsewhere around the world? Put your beliefs through a few hundred years of isolated, independent, individualistic, competing, frontier entitlement in 10,000 little communities, then kind of mash them all back together again into a few different still-competing strains, and this is what comes out the other end.

- It's all about your family and extended family relationships. After you've settled in one place for several generations - or moved together from frontier to frontier as a highly inter-related family & community unit - your extended family relations very much define the community. Everyone else is an outsider and you don't trust them. Let's take it a step further - you hate them with extreme prejudice and don't trust them a single inch.

- You may be rather poor, impoverished even, but you never consider yourself so. You're self-sufficient, take care of you and your own, and don't look up to any man (again, women usually don't enter the equation).

- Extremely distrustful of experts, outsiders, authority. Missouri is known as the "Show Me State" and for a long time I puzzled about this - what does this mean, "Show me"?

But now I know. It means, "You're an outsider. I don't believe one damn thing you say, no matter what. If you can put absolutely irrefutable proof right in front of my eyes, something I can grasp immediately with my 4th-grade frontier education, then maybe I'll think about changing my mind. Otherwise - forget it."

So it's all those factors, and a few more - but above all that those factors have been allowed to grow and evolve and fester and accumulate over 15 or 20 generations of ingrown, inbred, completely inward looking communities.

(Keep in mind that many families, particularly out in rural and small-town Missouri, are still living on the land their great-great-etc grandfather homesteaded back in the 1790s or 1820s or 1840s (grandmothers are rarely mentioned for some reason). My 'buddy' who is commander of a Sons of the Confederate Veterans chapter, still owns the land owned by his great-great grandfather that overlooks the winter camp where is great-great grandfather stayed while overwintering with the army of General Sterling Price back in 1861. And yes, he is still completely butt-hurt about the treatment his great-great grandfather receiving during and after the war - and he's quite happy to tell you about it. And so on - in every town and hamlet across the state.)

Anyway, all that is a lengthy introduction to say, if you are really curious about this particular strand of American culture and history, where it comes from and what it is like, I can't recommend highly enough this online course taught by a University of Missouri professor:

- OZK 150: Introduction to Ozarks Studies by Dr Brooks Blevins

Again it is not just about "Missouri" or "The Ozarks" but really about the evolution of that Scots-Irish borderlanders society as it moved across the American frontier - a large strand of it landing in the Missouri/Arkansas Ozarks.

TL;DR: It has relatively little to do with "who Great Britain sent over" and a lot to do with how American culture developed in the isolated and entitled hothouse of the American frontier over a few centuries.

Many of the characteristics are those held up as exemplary of the true and unique American character and mythos. But I have to say, having a better look at where those characteristics came from and why, I've come to really despise a lot of them. They are not admirable in any way.

But you can't blame it anything an outside country did to us. It's 100% homegrown.
posted by flug at 12:36 AM on December 13, 2021 [11 favorites]

If transported convicts in the USA were anything like those sent to Australia, we’re mostly pickpockets and Irish/Scot independence fighters. Transportation was as much about colonisation and populating imperial holdings with people who wouldn’t volunteer as it was about a justice system.
posted by chiquitita at 12:41 AM on December 13, 2021

> it relies upon an unspoken notion of criminality as inheritable in a quasi-genetic way.

> does that mean the children of poor people [...] will be inferior in some way because their ancestors were criminals? The whole idea is not merely wrong, but also gross.

I don't think it means either of those things, does it? All it relies on is that the idea that cultural attitudes are passed down from generation to generation, which is pretty much common sense.
posted by vincebowdren at 4:24 AM on December 13, 2021 [1 favorite]

Forget the ancestry-based arguments. They're pseudoscientific BS.

Look to the economic underpinnings of why people came to what is now the US and Canada and how culture intertwined with those dynamics.

Max Weber's eternal Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is a foundational read here. W.E.B. DuBois's oeuvre should be read in its entirety, and the very busy Marx and Engels also found time to write about the US Civil War and its origins.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 4:46 AM on December 13, 2021 [1 favorite]

I first heard about Honor Culture in the Honor Bound episode of the Hidden Brain podcast. It doesn't focus on ancestry so much as culture, and how it effects everything from bar fights to domestic violence to voting patterns. I found it fascinating and thought provoking.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 6:54 AM on December 13, 2021 [1 favorite]

And -- running with the Australian example for a moment -- what happens if you build a nation out of ex-convicts? Turns out you create the conditions for modern democracy. Britain exported its political troublemakers to Australia, and the result was that by the end of the nineteenth century, Australia was far more politically progressive. Did I hear you say 'Votes for Women'? Australia was twenty years ahead of Britain in giving women the right to vote.
posted by verstegan at 9:38 AM on December 13, 2021 [4 favorites]

Forget the ancestry-based arguments. They're pseudoscientific BS.

It's also a way for white people to dodge facing the mechanisms of race, slavery, genocide, etc. that underpin the creation and continued existence of the US. It's a form of white-on-white classist othering.
posted by Thorzdad at 9:39 AM on December 13, 2021

All it relies on is that the idea that cultural attitudes are passed down from generation to generation, which is pretty much common sense.

Ok, I can see why you might think that, but no, for a few reasons.

First, we're talking hundreds of years, many generations. Sure, cultural attitudes are partially passed down, but the concept of a "generation gap" isn't new - culture changes, always.

Second, while I don't know a reliable source off-hand for this, a quick Google search suggests that only 15-10% of white Americans can trace their ancestry back to the colonial period. Unlikely that all of those people are currently Republicans, so we're likely talking about less than 1/3 of the current party.

And third, perhaps most crucially, you have to ask, what constituted a criminal in 1600/1700s England. (And this assumes that America was a penal colony, which as others have pointed out, it wasn't) But Australia was, and as you can see here, while some of the crimes that could get someone shipped off were major, many were minor crimes like stealing a loaf of bread. In other words, as is generally the case, people who committed crimes out of desperation/structural problems in society, not their attitudes toward crime.
posted by coffeecat at 1:10 PM on December 13, 2021

> First, we're talking hundreds of years, many generations. Sure, cultural attitudes are partially passed down, but the concept of a "generation gap" isn't new - culture changes, always.

Not that much, not always.

> [...] only 15-10% of white Americans can trace their ancestry back to the colonial period.

This isn't an ancestry thing though - we're not talking about genetics. Incomers to a population can and do (depending on the circumstances) adopt the attitudes of the population they join.

> And third, perhaps most crucially, you have to ask, what constituted a criminal in 1600/1700s England.

I wasn't going into whether America was ever a penal colony (I know enough history to know that it wasn't); I was just debating the logic of whether a cultural "founder effect" rests on dubious assumptions. I don't think it does at all.
posted by vincebowdren at 12:58 PM on December 14, 2021